Hidden Hunger, Quiet Homelessness

How costs and need have moved since 2019

The chart below summarizes everything that follows. Each row is one indicator. Bars to the right of zero mean the number went up; bars to the left mean it went down. Green bars represent moves in the helpful direction (incomes rising, unemployment falling). Red bars represent moves that put more pressure on households (rent rising, more children without stable housing).

The pattern is the same in both counties: cost-side bars are large and red, while income gains barely register and labor-market bars are small and green. The bigger Kenosha-vs-Racine gap is in the homeless-student count, which rose dramatically in Kenosha and stayed flat in Racine.

Rent up 44–54 percent. Real income up 2–5.

If labor markets aren't the pressure, what is? Housing cost. The federal government publishes an annual estimate of fair market rent for each U.S. county, used to size housing-voucher payments. For a two-bedroom apartment, that estimate has risen faster than any other indicator in this dataset, in both counties, over the 2019-to-2026 window.

In fiscal 2024, the federal rent estimate for Kenosha jumped 22.5 percent in a single year. That reflects the federal housing agency updating its methodology with newer private-market rent data — not a redrawing of regional boundaries. The Kenosha County rent area has been defined the same way since at least 2010. The administrative estimate is finally catching up to what tenants were already paying.

Home prices tell the same story at the ownership end: up 49 percent in Kenosha and 50 percent in Racine since 2019, roughly tracking the state (+58 percent) and the country (+55 percent).

One-third of households can't cover the basics

United Way's research arm publishes a measure called ALICE — short for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. For each county it builds a survival budget: the bare-minimum cost of housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, and a small reserve. It then counts the share of households whose income falls below that budget. ALICE captures the working-poor gap that the federal poverty line misses by a wide margin.

For a Kenosha household under 65, the survival threshold itself rose from $45,000 in 2019 to about $56,500 in 2023 — a 25-percent increase in what it costs to keep a roof, food, and child care in place. A household whose income grew less than 25 percent fell below the threshold even after a nominal raise. The Kenosha-Racine divergence in student homelessness has a parallel here: more Kenosha households crossed below survival, while Racine's share held.

What this project does not claim

This is a descriptive side-by-side comparison of two counties across time. It is not a causal study. The fact that rents rose and homeless-student counts rose together in Kenosha — and that Racine stayed flat despite a similar labor market — is consistent with a cost-side interpretation. It does not prove one.

Two food-stamp indicators on this page are measured in different units and should not be added or directly compared. The Wisconsin Department of Health Services counts unduplicated cases, where one case is one household. The U.S. Census Bureau, through its small-area estimates program, counts individual recipients. Both are indexed to 2019 in the charts above for trend comparison only; the underlying levels are not comparable.

The federal rent figure used here is an administrative estimate — the fortieth percentile of two-bedroom asking rent — that the Department of Housing and Urban Development uses to size housing-voucher payments. It is updated each year using new American Community Survey data. It is not a market-rent series and will lag or lead actual market rents depending on where the survey is in its cycle.

Feeding America's county-level food-insecurity rate (Map the Meal Gap) would strengthen the food-need story but requires a request-gated download and is omitted from this version. Princeton's tract-level eviction estimates after 2016 and the Census Bureau's housing-cost-burden shares are obvious next additions for the cost-side story.

Every change on this page in one place

Each row is one indicator. Each column is a geography. Each cell is the percent change between 2019 and the most recent year that source has published.

Green marks the direction of improvement for each indicator (for example, unemployment falling or income rising). Red marks the direction of added pressure. "After inflation" uses the federal Consumer Price Index, which rose 22.7 percent from 2019 to 2024. Each row uses the most recent year its source has published; data horizons therefore vary. See the References section below for each source.

Where the numbers come from

Every number on this page comes from a publicly available source. The list below is grouped by topic; each entry names the agency or organization, the dataset, the years used, and a link.

Charts on this page are drawn with Chart.js. Data pulls and panel construction were performed in Python with the federal FRED, U.S. Census, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, and Wisconsin Department of Health Services public files listed above. Every number on this page has been verified against those raw sources.